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W22 Mentors

Short how-to for Chief Lab Manager from a Chief Lab Manager

Hi! Hope you feel good about your new role and responsibilities because they are very cool and highly important!

First - if you will ever have any doubts - feel free to ask the instructor or anyone in the team, you will be surprised how helpful and nice they are. Second, I prepared a sort of how-to list for you, which I hope will give you an idea of where to start.

So let’s start:

Look over all labs for correct structure

Look over the Lab guidelines to verify that everything is in order.

1. Check, in advance and then after the labs, whether the lab solutions are available online

The tricky point here is that there always be something online on a theme. What we need to do is to adapt our labs so it is not so easy for those who will google the labs to find the exact solutions ready-to-paste.

  • A few days before lab’s released, For all labs:

    1. Google the lab instructions

      • the whole block, if it is short

      • the problematic parts

      • shortly rephrased instructions

    2. Check the popular websites that you aware of - such as Chegg

    3. Decide whether is this an instructions directly or just alike post

  • Create the list of labs with the whole solution online

  • Create a slightly problematic list of labs

  • Either adapt instructions by yourself (or with CLD/ALD) or share the result with your instructor in the way that is OK for both of you (slack channel, email with the subject, etc)

We do not want students to suffer, but the copied solution is a wasted time for them, time, that they will be lacking very soon when the hard stuff comes.

2. Post lab recordings - record and upload to the drive the zoom recordings from the labs

  1. Create or ask your instructor to create a folder on the GoogleDrive that will store the recording for this year. Be sure that this folder is accessible for the students.

  2. Record your own lab session and be sure to remind all other mentors to record theirs (one-two miss a day is OK, but more often - worse)

  3. On the day of lab sections post the recordings to the lab. No processing is required, but be consistent with namings, e.g. week3_lab_11am.mp4. If other mentors upload their recordings by themself (which makes sense) - notify them about the namings rules and check that they follow the rules.

  4. Do not forget to add a link on this drive area to gauchospace, if it is not there yet

2.1 + post attendance numbers (and remind others to post them from their sessions).

  1. Find out the way to collect attendance that fit’s you: e.g. post on slack with replies from each mentor, google drive with excel document, etc

  2. Check the numbers after each lab section day and remind the mentors to collect these numbers if needed (better before the labs :) )

  3. Be sure that the instructor is aware of the way and concreteness of this information. Notify the instructor if the numbers are unexpectedly small.

  4. The way how these numbers can be collected is:

    • “Participants” counter on zoom

    • Names of the students with +/- for attendance recordings in excel for each session. It is not very easy to collect names from Zoom, so you can:

      • ask students to message their names in chat, so later you can collect that names via script

      • screenshot the participant list (not advised)

  5. Be sure that other mentors are aware of the way how you record the attendance and help them to parse the data if needed.

Hope you will have an amazing mentoring semester! Have the best of luck!

Acknowledgement

Original draft was created by Liubov Kurafeeva.